“I think to taxpayers and society there is a return on investment intrinsically, but it is hard to quantify,” Janssens says.

Hales set aside $1
million in his 2014 city budget for an Innovation Fund to invest in
creative ideas that will save the city money in the long run.

The Portland City Council will vote March 12to distribute $906,000 to seven Innovation Fund proposals.

The PulsePoint app,
in addition to notifying people trained in CPR about nearby emergencies,
will also identify the location of the nearest automated defibrillator.

The costs include
$20,000 over two years to license the app and another $63,000 for
computer system support. The proposal also includes $10,000 to publicize
the app and $15,000 for CPR classes.

The proposal before the City Council says the app will provide “no direct city cost benefit.”

“Saving money would
be one of the criteria, but not the only criteria,” says Andrew Scott,
Portland’s budget director. “The idea was to create efficiencies with
the way the city does business, one of those ways being through saving
money, but it was also created to find new and creative ways to better
serve Portland residents through improving services.”

PulsePoint is used in 530 communities in 17 states. About 6,000 people have downloaded the app.

“This app can be used
in the event that no one around is willing to provide CPR, because some
people do have that fear,” Charleston says. “It isn’t designed to be
the primary response piece. It is more of a backup before we can get to
the scene.”

Charleston says his
agency has no documented case of PulsePoint saving a life. Neither does
his agency have concrete numbers for how often PulsePoint has brought
citizens to the scene of a heart attack, but in the handful of cases in
which it has, there was no need to perform CPR.

PulsePoint is the
invention of Richard Price, a California firefighter who says he was at
lunch with friends in 2011 when EMS crews responded to a cardiac arrest
in the building next door. He realized he could have helped by
responding first if he had known.

Price says
PulsePoint’s goal is to get CPR started earlier and defibrillators used
more often. “Those are our primary metrics,” Price says, “and if you
think getting CPR started more often and defibrillators out means more
lives saved, that is what we focus on.”

Price says a total of
2,038 alerts have been sent through PulsePoint, but there are no
statistics showing whether citizens responding to the alerts provided
any real assistance, let alone saved a life.

Under the city’s
proposal, Portland Fire & Rescue will have to keep statistics
showing how often citizens responded to PulsePoint calls and what the
outcome was.

Janssens says her
agency has one of the best survival rates for cardiac-arrest victims,
and it hopes to increase that success even more.

“The app is
forward-leaning,” Janssens says. “We started looking into it two years
ago, but it is difficult to get $100,000 with our budgets being very
tight. This fund was an opportunity to do something different.”